


I've Wandered Many a Weary Foot

by Ifyouthknew



Series: Earth's Rambunctious Children [4]
Category: Psych (TV 2006)
Genre: Angst, Calm Before The Storm, Established Relationship, M/M, Mild Hurt/Comfort, New Year's Eve, New York City, Revelations, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-17 15:27:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29102511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ifyouthknew/pseuds/Ifyouthknew
Summary: Last stop before the doomsday—New York fricking City. New Year’s Eve brings a new revelation. Shawn sheds the cloak of “woe is me” on the right course of his life. This is the closing time, a fake psychic would know, as the clock strikes twelve. Or is it thirteen? Tomorrow, however desolate it may be, remains tomorrow.
Relationships: Carlton Lassiter/Shawn Spencer
Series: Earth's Rambunctious Children [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2109414
Comments: 2
Kudos: 9





	I've Wandered Many a Weary Foot

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from the lyric of "Auld Lang Syne."

Somehow, Shawn coaxed Lassiter into going to New York City together with him for New Year’s Eve. This would be the last holiday they spent with each other, Shawn said, alone.

A month ago, they received a phone call from the adoptive agency that a pregnant lady in Arizona had selected their profiles and would like to give her baby to them. She was due in about three months. The news was overwhelming since neither of them had had high hopes because they had been told the process could take years.

When asked why she chose them instead of the other applicants, she responded, “I just figured a police chief would go out of their way to protect their family,” which cast a shade over Shawn’s face at this end of the phone.

Sitting right next to his husband, Shawn said, trying to sound as casual as possible, “A psychic would too, you know. I’m just putting this out there…probably not necessary info for you since you’ve already chosen us. No takesy backsy!”

She laughed and said she was sure of it, but it sounded more out of politeness than sincerity, to which Shawn couldn’t help but add, “If the police chief died—sorry, Lassie—the psychic would take over his job and do just as fine. You would know if you understand the spiritual realm.”

“Okay,” she said a tad awkwardly.

“Okay,” Shawn replied quietly under a shut-up glare.

Lassiter told Shawn the whole New York thing was a sham and a hoax cheating tourists who don’t know any better. But as soon as the word _Hamilton_ was uttered, Lassiter caved like a small famished child before a candy store. He purchased two tickets to the musical before the plane tickets even occurred to his overheated foggy fanboy brain.

There was a period in high-school when Shawn felt so suffocated by everything—his family, school, his family…his family again, that he wanted nothing more than a life in the celebrated New York City. To taste the New York doughnuts. To picnic in Central Park. To ride the New York subway. To be catcalled by the local pervs while walking tall and casual in cashmere on Fifth Ave. He swore to look at this place with newcomers’ eyes, always.

Everything about New York City, he learned from TV and the big screen, which, in an odd way, was exactly the reason he had never been there, not even when he was on his own, free of any ties, traveling across the country to find the piece that had been missing in his life. The Big Apple was another Abigail Lytar, the girl that could only be fixated on at a distance, never to be touched or whispered by its name.

Shawn was stringent about almost nothing in life, but that city on the East Coast was an absolute exception. When he stepped off the plane in JFK onto the holy land, if that was ever going to happen, he wanted everything to be right, from the weather over his head down to the underwear on his bottom. Nothing could be amiss. He had to be perfect for the perfect NYC.

So when 2016 was about to end, at the age of thirty-nine, as a locally renowned psychic detective who had the luck to partner with his best friend and to goof around every day, with five years of marriage under his belt with his Lassie (though it was three, technically speaking), with a baby on the way, there was no better time than now. This was as perfect as he could be.

Because after the baby came…he had no doubt he would be a constant source of disappointment just like back in high-school, to his dad as his dad had been to him, and Lassiter, to the innocent child that would be depending on him soon.

Now as an expectant papa, all he had to do was expecting.

And he had a feeling that the blissful time was running out. Perhaps it was because his life had been on the same track for so long, however right it felt, or perhaps it was because this life suddenly seemed like a stolen one, unreal to him, which he was bound to lose someday and it would be someday soon. The upcoming parental obligations weren’t the source of his doomsday sensation, he knew. He just felt like a fraud, figuratively, deserving nothing yet earning everything. He needed to have all the fun while it lasted.

Light snow fell when they strolled onto the Brooklyn Bridge, their toes frozen, their fingers numb, yet neither of them wanted to return to the comfort of their hotel.

Shawn stopped midway, stood facing the rusty rail under a sign that said **YES LOVE NO LOCKS FINE $100** , and looked out at the vast East River. Lassiter did the same, staying abreast with his husband. The New York skyline shined next to them, tall and solemn, noisy for certain, but they couldn’t hear what was being said on that side.

The air felt icy on their exposed cheeks as the boisterous snowflakes danced without order before landing on their shoulders, then vanishing as if they had never come, never welcomed by the Earth. Shawn sniffed then blew out a hot breath that instantly turned into a fog. He blew out some more. Pretending to be dinosaurs, he and Gus did that whenever they could, not just when they were little.

“You cold?” Lassiter asked.

“Not particularly.”

“Nice view,” Lassiter commented. Coming from him, it was a high compliment.

Shawn didn’t echo his feeling with words. He sniffed some more.

“Tissue?” Lassiter waved some before Shawn’s face.

He appreciated not being asked whether he was cold again. He took the tissue and blew his nose. “Weird,” Shawn started, his eyes mused on the water, the tip of his nose red because of the coldness and being rubbed by his hasty and ungentle touch, “the city is so big…but—I don’t think it has a place for me here, Lassie.”

“You’ve wanted it for too long,” Lassiter tried to come up with an explanation for him.

“Everything is better than what I’ve imagined—the view, the people, the stench in the subway, but it just…” Shawn clenched his teeth, banged his fist against the air in frustration, his nose stung again. “I’ve been to so many places, Carlton. So many—” He choked in sorrow.

After a dry laugh at himself, he continued, “No place ever feels right. I postponed coming here year after year because I was so sure New York wouldn’t be one of them.”

“You yourself said this is the best city in the world. If not here, where do you want to be?”

“Nowhere I guess.”

“What are you looking for then?” Lassiter asked. It was a weak mentality, in his opinion, for Shawn to self-sabotage, whine, when he had what he had asked for right in his hand. No thrill was ever enough. He always reached for the clouds, only to find there were higher clouds. Lassiter worried that he would be off the Earth before he had a chance to persuade him to stay, abandoning him in a heartbeat.

He felt like a fool, once in a while, for thinking someone like Shawn would fall for someone like him, let alone be tied down to play house together.

“Nothing at the moment.” Putting a finger over Lassiter’s lips, Shawn stopped him from interrupting. “I was ambitious—hear me out! My ambition wasn’t like yours, I know. I didn’t want a career. I didn’t want to buy a beach house. I didn’t strive to be the best husband or father. But I did _want_ something. I wanted adventures, fun, a taste of everything. I wanted people to point at me and say ‘This man has lived. This man has it all.’

“But all I can think of now is having a family. How pathetic is that? No offense, Lassie. Just let me mourn. Turns out my final destination, after so many turns, is to have a husband and raise a child with him. I bet the young me would be thoroughly appalled. He would say I should want more and something like I should find an apartment in Greenwich Village to sleep until noon then hit a bar after midnight then retrace Bruce Willis’s steps in _Die Hard_. But I don’t want more. I don’t want to want more.

“Get married and have a kid…Sweet Lady Liberty! How could this be what I want all along?”

“Too bad I’m not letting you off the hook now. You’re halfway there. Sorry for corrupting you and leading you down the rabbit hole.” Lassiter pulled Shawn’s hand out of his pocket then squeezed it.

“That’s why I’m looking for nothing now.”

Before they left, Shawn knocked on the rail with his knuckles and asked, “Do you want to put a love lock on the bridge?”

“Do you have a hundred bucks?” Lassiter responded, marveling at his own sudden willingness to break the rule.

On New Year’s Eve, they went to the Time Square to watch the ball drop, where Lassiter called once again “a tourist trap.”

Lassiter cuddled Shawn from behind, his big coat covering both of them to shield them away from the teeth-cluttering coldness. Shawn was standing on and leaning against a barricade. They had come early to find a better spot. The price was the never-ending wait, but miraculously, neither of them minded. Cases, creepy criminals, Juliet, Gus, work schedule, baby shower, baby diet, Halloween costumes for three, they talked about them all. Before long, midnight was five minutes away and the place was swamped with strangers they would never meet again, faces forgotten, stories untold.

Shawn asked Lassiter which song he liked best from the musical _Hamilton_ that they had gone to two days ago. “I bet it’s ‘My Shot,’” he shouted, his voice barely audible over the deafening noises.

“Good guess. But wrong,” Lassiter shouted back. “My favorite is ‘Dear Theodosia.’”

“I know.”

“No, you don’t! You said I liked ‘My Shot’ the best!”

“But deep down I know.” Shawn patted his chest.

Lassiter gave him a scornful shove and snorted.

“You don’t wanna know how I know?” Shawn asked after a pause when Lassiter didn’t reply.

“I know.”

“No, you don’t!” It was Shawn’s turn to snort.

“Because that’s your favorite too,” Lassiter said, shrugging as if he had just raised his hand and answered the easiest question written on the blackboard.

Away from Lassiter’s eyesight, his lower lip twitched. He didn’t confirm what Lassiter had said, but then again, it wasn’t needed. The crowd became fussier as the new year approached nearer and nearer. Lassiter held Shawn tight, his hot breath melting Shawn’s frozen ear.

Neither of them knew what the next year held, or the year after it, or the year after that, but they believed without a doubt that for now, there was a home for both of them to return to, and it wasn’t New York City, wasn’t the beach house they moved in after they got married or even Santa Barbara. It wasn’t anywhere tangible or visible but magnificently real. It tasted like the chicken wings Lassiter makes, sounded like Shawn’s rambling about a random 80s movie, looked like Lassiter’s sternum bush, smelled like Shawn’s aftershave, felt like the coat that was wrapping them both. 

Home lies where the other is.

Shawn leaned back against Lassiter and tilted his head up as the countdown appeared on the giant screen among all the other illuminating billboards. 59, 58, 57…He felt like he would have been sucked in if Lassiter hadn’t been right behind him, holding him close.

The fear of a doomsday resurfaced. His heart dropped into his stomach, which then tied into knots. His ear buzzed, his vision blurred. Nausea and dizziness hit him like a tsunami that dragged him into the ocean. He was drifting further and further away from the shore…from the man behind him who seemed so rock-solid.

“Lassie, I don’t feel well,” Shawn said, swallowing, tugging Lassiter’s sleeve, his voice quieter than the buzzing of a mosquito.

Lassiter didn’t hear him. He was busy fending them off all the protruding elbows and shoving shoulders.

In a fog, Shawn heard Lassiter started counting down along with the cheerful crowd with the same amount of enthusiasm as them. “10, 9, 8…”

Shawn wanted to chant with them. He wouldn’t forgive himself if he missed it. He tried to move his lips and tongue, pretending he was screaming from the top of his lungs, but at the same time, he wanted to beg everyone to stop, especially Lassiter, because you don’t do a countdown when your husband is being ravished from you right under your nose.

“3, 2, 1…Happy New Year!” Lassiter yelled, shaking Shawn in ecstasy.

Confetti floated in the air, lightening up the dark sky momentarily, before they fell to the ground in a rush then became the forgotten pieces of trash below everybody’s eye level.

Lassiter turned Shawn around and dived in to kiss him, riding the high like all the other lovebirds around them when the song “Auld Lang Syne” drifted into their ears. Like a true love’s kiss from the old fairy tales, it brought Shawn back, to the city that never sleeps, to the Times Square, to the arms of his husband. The cloud cleared the moment Lassiter’s lips brushed across his. He kissed him back as passionately.

He didn’t question what had happened mere seconds ago. The most important thing to him was, at this moment, he was here, by Lassiter’s side, no matter how far he had traveled, how loose he had felt. If none of the other things felt real, this kiss was real, this person enveloping him was real.

When they pulled back and gazed into each other’s dazed glinting eyes, Shawn could point at himself candidly and not hesitate to say with every ounce of his being, “This man has lived. This man has it all.”

**Author's Note:**

> Rest assured, Shawn was not ill. He just had a prodrome of vasovagal syncope. But if you read on to the next/last part of this series, which will be multi-chaptered, you'll probably find you'd rather him being ill. So buckle up or duck. 
> 
> Hope I haven't bored you so far.


End file.
